I love music, but you know what I love just as much as that? Album covers. I’m a visual person and I love going to art museums and marvelling at the fine art and I love going to record stores, perusing the bins, and looking at all the cool album covers. There’s no doubt that a striking or aesthetically pleasing album cover can catch the eye and make your album stand out and pique someone’s interest. And album covers are just the beginning of a band’s aesthetic. A great album cover design is more than just donned on an LP sleeve, it also can be part of a whole package for an artist’s image for whatever era they’re in. Great album art could end up immortalised on t-shirts, posters, other merch, and even on stage at concerts as part of the set or visuals. It’s not every day that you get to talk to an artist that has an incredible star-studded CV filled with rock bands that you’ve definitely heard on classic rock radio or have in your record collection: a real list of the who’s who of classic rock. Bands like Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, The Allman Brothers Band, Quiet Riot, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Styx, Blue Öyster Cult, Yngwie Malmsteen, Jean-Luc Ponty, George Thorogood, and King Crimson. Living the dream!
I have a very special treat for my readers in this blog post. We are very lucky to have Greek-American artist and illustrator Ioannis with us on The Diversity of Classic Rock to talk about his journey as an artist and give insights into the album cover art. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Ioannis!
Angie: Can you tell me the story of the Abandon cover that you had designed for Deep Purple and this reissue of the artwork?
Ioannis: The project started when I received a phone call one afternoon by a gentleman named Jim Lewis who managed Yngwie Malmsteen who was one of his clients and Jim used to be the vice president of A&R for Polygram and he did a lot of the heavy metal rock bands and so I knew him from those years and he had started his own management company so he calls me back too and says, “Listen, what are you doing right now?” I was like, “Sitting down and having lunch.” He’s like, you know, “Forget lunch, get in your car, and get down here.” His office was maybe about 30 minutes away from my office. And I say, “Why? What’s up?” And he goes “I got the manager of Deep Purple sitting here,” because his office was next door to Jim’s and I say, “Why? What’s going on?” He says, “They got a real big problem. They have a new record coming out and they just saw artwork that the record company handed in and they’re horrified with it and they’re desperate and they said [to Jim], ‘who do you use?’ and I said, ‘I work with Ioannis.’ And they go, ‘Yeah we know who he is.’ And he said ‘Yeah, he could handle this.’ So bring it in.” I think it was the fastest car ride, it’s like a 20 minute trip, but I think I got down there in like 7 minutes when I heard this (laughs).
So I ran down there and when I walk in Bruce Payne, their manager was there and Roger Glover the bass player for Deep Purple was with him. I have been working enough in the industry that I was used to meeting famous rock stars and celebrities and stuff and you know, it’s a project, it’s a job, but to me it had very special meaning, that moment because when I was 13 years old, the first record I ever bought with my own money was Deep Purple’s Machine Head, and they were like my band, you know (laughs) when I was a kid. So to me, one of the guys who co-wrote “Smoke on the Water” and “Highway Star” it was a moment. I was a bit nervous. We sat down and we started discussing, they played me a track of the album and they weren’t sure about the title yet. Roger was producing the record, he was very clever about ideas, he was very artistic, a great photographer too by the way, about things and he said, “I’m thinking of something like, hey I got it, a band on. Abandon.” Right? So it’s got a double entendre. So you want me to focus on the title a band on or abandon, and he goes, “No, no, no, let’s make it Abandon.” And he goes, “So we’re thinking of throwing yourself into something with abandon, you know?” Like what if we had a swimming pool filled with sharks and the guy was diving into it and I said, “Okay, but there’s a band called Great White who did a cover like that, you don’t want to be similar, you want to be trendsetters.” And they’re like, “Alright.” I said, “Okay so what’s the timeline?” And they go, “We need everything within a week.” I’m like, “Guys!” You know, they’re like, “Come back with three or four concepts within a week.”
So that’s literally what happened. I raced home and worked through the night through ideas and went back to them. Roger at the time lived in Greenwich, Connecticut in this huge mansion with his recording studio and everything and so I went to meet them there and I laid out three ideas and instantly they pointed to the idea with the diving man.
I’m primarily an illustrator so I could do that, but I also can do photographic stuff, digital stuff like that and I thought a photographic approach would make more sense than an illustration for this one. So there were conscious decisions that were made, the idea is just sort of an absurd situation going on where a guy’s diving off a skyscraper, but it’s almost a surrealist thing where if you look at the image carefully, there’s a reflection under him and there’s a slight, where his hands are touching, there’s a slight ripple created, like he’s actually hitting a puddle of water, so I’ve always wanted to do something that looked very surreal, the blue tint was obviously because they’re called Deep Purple so the purplish blue tint of the artwork that was given, instead of it being colour, I worked with black and white photographs and composed it digitally and then we did the tinting and so on.
A big influence when I was in my teens was the record covers by Hipgnosis, those are the guys who did Pink Floyd and stuff. So that sense of surrealism that they did was a big influence on me and I wanted it to look like a Floydish kind of a cover, have that weirdness. Anyway, they loved it and we extended the ideas from there and I guess the coolest moment for me was, it’s weird, you do this stuff and it’s on a very personal level, your own thing, you’re dealing with bands and you’re talking to them and you’re exchanging it and you never, it’s work, right, and you’re in this enclosed space. The thing that always amazed me about this, and I’ve never gotten over this, the tonnes of things I’ve done for these bands, is you forget that once it’s out and it’s ready then it goes out into public consumption and the reactions, then it dawns on you, the gravity of what you’ve done and it’s like walking out into the middle of a room naked, right? Everybody now is aware of what you’re doing and they’re looking at you. But the minute it hit me how important it was, so I finished the packaging and we ship it out to the record label and everything got approved and that was sort of that. It was great, you know, we had lunch together a couple of times and dinner and it was fun and I went onto my next gig.
So about a couple of months passed and I got a call from management saying, “Hey, listen we’re playing in your area next week, the guys would love to see you, you wanna come down and check out the show?” I’m like, “Yeah, that’d be great!” as a fan of the band. It was a huge tour. I think it was them and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Dream Theater, it was the tour, it was 1998. So I walk in and the place is sold out, the place is packed. So I walk in and it was my wife, my brother and so all of a sudden, that’s when it started to sink in. I’m looking around and there’s all these people walking around with a t-shirt with my artwork on it (chokes up) and so I remember, we sit down in the third row, centre, and we’re getting ready and the lights dim and they start with the opening chords of “Highway Star” as they start the show and as they start that, this huge backdrop appears behind them and it’s a massive recreation of the artwork and at that point, you know, excuse my language, my brother, who’s younger than me and is partners in the company, just grabbed my shoulder and said, “Hey man, you fucking did Deep Purple!” I gotta be honest with you, (chokes up) I got misty-eyed because when my mind went back to being 13 and buying Machine Head and daydreaming about rock and roll, if you told me back then that decades later I would call these guys friends and I’d be able to work with them. That would have blown my mind! So that’s kind of the cool thing about it.
Angie: That’s surreal! A dream come true!
Ioannis: It’s weird. I never planned it this way or anything, but you know, the world I grew up in in the 70s and the early 80s and everything, we lived in a time where things went in and out of fad very quickly so by the time you became a Queen fan, you were already looking at the next band was Journey and by the time you got into those bands, you were already getting into The Police and The Ramones and what was going on. I remember in high school it would be like Led Zeppelin, that’s that older band from two years ago. Queen’s the new thing now. Aerosmith. You know what I mean? Everything was moving at a very very rapid pace so the massive resurgence of classic rock which I think started in the late 90s/early 2000s and all of these bands, some never lost their popularity and some just came back with a vengeance. Judas Priest, Styx, and all of these guys and they’re massively touring and everything. And they started releasing records. It was weird. It was all those bands that I sort of grew up with, but I stopped listening to.
Angie: How did you get into rock music in the first place?
Ioannis: Oh god, it was just luck and perseverance I guess. It was very improbable how it started. I’m a Greek immigrant. We came to the United States when I was 9/10 years old, sponsored by my uncle who was already in the US and brought us over. That was in the late 60s and my dad was a housepainter and the family, like every other Greek, all the other side businesses were restaurants and that was going to be my lot. I was going to go to school and work at a restaurant unless I made something of myself in college. Drawing and illustrating and daydreaming about being [an artist]. When I told my parents what I was gonna do, I might as well have told them I was gonna go to Mars and be an astronaut, it made about as much sense to them. It just started very improbably, it literally started when I was 15-16 years old. I was working on the weekends at a small diner that sold ice cream sandwiches and stuff like that, that was your money for the weekend.
There was a thriving rock club scene in New Haven, it’s where Yale University is located, it’s at the heart of Yale and of course they would go out on the weekend and go and see rock and roll bands and stuff. One particular night the club two doors down from me, the guy came in and he had run out of ice and he needed ice for his club. He said, “We need some ice, our ice machine broke down.” So as I’m getting him ice, he goes to me and goes, “Hey, you know, your uncle says you’re a really good artist.” And I was like, “Yeah I do stuff.” I was only 16, you know. And he goes, “Hey listen man, I got a band playing next week, would you like to draw a poster for me to promote it and put it up?”, and I thought wow that’s great! And he said, “I’ll pay you for it too. I mean, it’s not for free, if I like it, you know.” So I did this thing and came in the next day and he was like, “Wow, this is great! Hey would you like to do some more?” So I was like, “Yeah.” I was 16, turning 17 and by the end of the at summer, I had gotten a little business going on because the word had gotten out, it was like there was this crazy Greek kid who does this really cool rock and roll stuff and there were a lot of clubs so I started getting hired by all of these clubs to do the posters for and then the bands started hiring me to do logos for them and that gravitated to the radio stations, the rock radio stations started getting me to do more work for them and it was around 1980-1981, somebody introduced me to this guy who was high up in the music industry and showed him my work and it was really word of mouth and that was my first professional job that I got.
I did my first record cover in 1983 for CBS Records. Again it was just word of mouth and the guy who managed that band was a lawyer for Aerosmith and he introduced me to the management company who managed Aerosmith and at the time they managed every major hard rock band, literally it seemed, in the world. They managed Def Leppard, AC/DC, The Scorpions, and so on. And I was like 19-20 years old when I was in there and I was like hobnobbing with these guys and just learning my craft and it sort of went from there. At one point I figured out how to do layouts and design. It’s all self taught even though I was going to school for art and graphic design, I was bored to death with what was going on. They’d be sitting there telling us to design a catalogue for L.L. Bean or something and that would be the school project, and I’m like, “Yeah, but I wanna do a record cover for Judas Priest,” (laughs). And I was in New York showing them my portfolio and I was getting these gigs, right? And it just kinda went from there, you know, and it just blossomed. So it’s been a hell of a career.
Angie: What artists influenced you?
Ioannis: I could tell you specifically as far as, I was a big fan of comic book art and so my early influences were artists like Frank Frazetta and Barry Windsor-Smith and guys like that. As far as fine artists, it was mostly the illustrators like Maxwell Parrish, surrealists like Salvador Dalí.
But the most massive influence I had, I can tell you this specifically what it was and this is where it all came together for me. I remember a specific day when I was 16 when I walked into a record store. That was my hangout, I would just go and hang around record stores because I love rock and roll and so on and a friend of mine goes, “Hey, check this out! We got a book in that I think you’re gonna like.” And I’m like, “Wow, you guys sell books now?” Because you know, record stores didn’t do that back in those days. He goes, “Yeah, yeah! You know, the guy who sells posters, he printed a book too and they’re distributing it.” So hands me a copy of a book called Views and it’s by the artist Roger Dean and obviously I recognised the art immediately because you know, back in those days the record store would be filled with posters of Roger Dean’s artwork that would sell and I went home and I ate that up. That became like my bible, I looked at it and I’m like, I understood Roger Dean’s work. It made sense to me because I sort of understood what was going on and how he was doing that because it looked like comic book artwork, but it looked cooler. It was more vibrant and he worked with these really famous bands that I was a fan of and that book would never leave my sight. I walked around with that frickin’ thing. I’d go to school with that book under my arm (laughs). I just devoured that! Within a week, I had made up my mind, I was gonna be just like this guy and that was that. As a side note, the coolest thing is I’ve met him now several times and I think I was at the Yes 50th anniversary party because the manager of Yes who was somebody I that I knew and he was back there and it’s cool to meet your idols in that sense. So I remember talking to him and he was aware of my work and we’re conversing for a while and at one point I just stopped and I just started to say, “You have no fucking idea,” I said to him, “how much you’ve changed my life,” (laughs). “You know, it was because of you that I’m doing it as well.” That’s really nice to say that and it really meant a lot to me it was just a lot. So he’s probably the largest influence as far as a career in illustration.
The second biggest influence as far as having approach on album cover design though in general would be Hipgnosis. It was literally hard, you would look at your record collection in the 70s, it was impossible to find albums that were not designed by them. It was incredible the amount of work that they did. The major acts at the time: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Yes, Genesis, I mean it all came through Pink Floyd of course, it was their biggest client. It all came through them, very cool stuff.
Angie: When you design an album cover how much does the music or the band themselves influence the design?
Ioannis: Oh, a lot. Very much. I always see the art, I see it like a movie, right. I see their music as a soundtrack to the art and very complementary and that’s the way I want to approach it. Usually they’ll hire you because they like your style, they like what you’ve done and they want something similar. So they may have some ideas, but mostly they sort of leave it up to you. I tend to listen to some of the tracks, the title, I look at the lyrics or lines and I will create ideas or images in my head, but when I do the artwork I specifically, one thing I did like Hipgnosis did, somebody like Roger Dean, I realised even though as much as I wanted to emulate him, has a very identifiable, strong style so it’s basically either you have a Dean cover or you don’t, right? Which could work well in certain situations across the board because what I’ve found out that I was gonna make a living was Rush doesn’t want to look like Yes and U2 doesn’t want to look like Rush so you cannot impose the same style on everyone.
So the way I started to approach it would be, I would try to, I would look at previous album covers by the band and I would try, I would always approach it from their fans’ points of view. In other words, what would their fans expect? What would the fans want if you’re doing an album cover for Black Sabbath or Judas Priest, there’s a certain following that they have, there’s certain imagery they respond to and I look, you gotta get into that headspace of where they’re at and then the artwork that you create connects with the band and the band’s base, it doesn’t matter. They’re not just gonna respond to it, so I think that’s a very important factor.
The other thing that I think of is, and I think if you hit that spot it’s great for the band visually, it creates an aura or a look for them that establishes [them]. But also purely what the record label cares about from the financial point of view, the bottom line, it could be lucrative for the band and that’s why I think you need imagery like that. Even today with everything that’s happened, we don’t use vinyls not as much, but you still need to create that because merchandising now is such a major part of what the band does. And again, when you hit that, you could surely have a great record without a great record cover, I’ll be the first one to admit that, but if the design works and it’s great, it could be financially thriving for the band and the best examples that I can give is well, Roger Dean with Yes. Would Yes have been successful without Roger Dean? Of course, they would have, their music. But when he created the imagery, it became associated with those visuals, it gave them a very strong identity. And then the amount of sales it did. On the other extreme, for instance a band like Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden would have been again a successful whatever, the music. The graphics that were created for them and that character he created, Eddie, the merchandising sales that it does based around that is outrageously good. You look at Pink Floyd, you see kids walking down the street wearing that prism on their t-shirt and some of them couldn’t even tell you who that band is on the t-shirt that they’re wearing (laughs). They know that has become almost like a cultural icon, the prism. It’s incredible.
Like I said, when you hit that mark, how great it could be and I can’t say you always pull it off, but that’s what you try to shoot for. So you’re very well aware that I’m creating something specificly for a product at that moment at that time, but you’re trying to create something that has wider range, bigger goals because it’s great across the board and I’ll tell you, fans can be tough, man. Because they’ll let you have it if they don’t like what they see. You could be arrogant about it and say “Well I don’t care what the fans think or whatever” but believe me, speaking of other designers and my peers, no they care (laughs). It bothers them if like someone’s like “Great album, but damn what a lousy record cover that was. Who came up with that idea?” It’s a long answer, but I’m trying to give you as much perspective as possible.
Angie: That’s all very true. What album covers that you’ve designed are you the most proud of?
Ioannis: Oh boy, that’s a tough one. I’ve worked in different genres, I’d just have to go by that. Probably with the jam bands, my album cover for The Allman Brothers Band, again I guess I’m proud of it mostly because I thought when I finished it I’d done a decent job, but then it’s actually this May it’s gonna be the 30th anniversary of the album. That image then and the years to come took a real life of its own, it became very popular among the fans and t-shirts and so on. So that one for Uriah Heep for the classic would be Wake the Sleeper. I love Deep Purple Abandon, I thought I really hit the mark on that one. I’ve done three or four covers for them, but that was probably my favourite for them. There’s a prog metal band called Fate’s Warning in the mid 80s that I did. Those were illustrations and those illustrations have become. I see that album cover appear on best of heavy metal covers of all time lists constantly, it keeps coming up. It’s weird, you know, it’s like it’s not necessarily the biggest bands that make the lists, it’s just bands who command a really big cult following and have fans who are really into artwork, but that’s transcended. So yeah, it’s weird, like I said, it’s funny, to the jam band fans they think I’m a jam band artist, to the heavy metal fans they think I’m a heavy metal artist, to the progressive rock fans they think I’m a progressive rock artist. I mean they only know me from that art, sometimes when I show my portfolio and they’re like, “You did that? I- How could you have done that?” It was weird. As a matter of fact, I remember a specific moment, I had done some work for some of the acts of DGM so when I got the commission to do the band King Crimson, which I was massively nervous about because they’re such an avant-garde type of band and Robert Fripp is such an interesting character and everything. When the bass player for the band Trey Gunn, introduced the idea that he wanted to work with me because he’d worked with me before, the question that I remember he was asked is they knew me because of the Allman Brothers and like, well yeah, but what the hell do mushrooms and the Allman Brothers have to do with art? And he was going, “No, no, no wait until you see his ideas. He gets it. He understands the band.” So I always run into that when I do these things by the way. So yeah, those three or four covers would come off the top of my head. I’ve done about 180 album covers, actually closer to 200 right now. So it’s a tough one.
Angie: A lot to pick from! Here’s another tough one: What are your favourite album covers of all time?
Ioannis: That’s an easy one, that one for me is an easy one. I would say Relayer by Yes, Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer – H.R. Giger’s cover – I remember seeing that and I could not get my head around it. How was this created? And I was blown away. I thought it was photographic or something. I was blown away when I found out it was an actual illustration. Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin. Probably Wish You Were Here, I just felt that it was really well done. I like Anton Corbijn’s work so U2’s album The Joshua Tree. I think it was a very cool elegant design. Very contemporary. The Queen II album cover, photography by Mick Rock, who incidentally was a friend of 30 years we had just lost him recently and it broke my heart. I’ve done a tonne of work with Mick together. That was a tough one.
Angie: You’ve had a long career and technology has changed so much over the years, has the album design process changed much since then?
Ioannis: Absolutely, for one it’s a lot easier to do stuff now because it was a very painstaking process, you know? Back in the 80s that’s when I really started working with professionals in the 80s, you would have to do a painting or you would do a photograph, let’s say, that would be the cover, right? And then you would have to go and get that photograph and get it prepared and you had to do what they called layouts, which just looked like mechanical designs for the Apollo 11 mission, literally. You had boards and you would spec out, design the layout with sheet overlays and this and that and then you would have to figure out for lyrics and credits how the type would work so that means you would have to write it out and you would have to write it out and you would have to dictate to the typesetter, “Okay this has to be this big and that’s gonna be the title and that’s gonna be this one.” It was a language you spoke to describe all of that and you would do all of this then and once you put all of this together, which costs like a couple of thousand bucks just to get that ready then you would have to hand it in to the design team, which they would do what they call separations which they would create film overlays for the printers and that was an expensive process. I remember back in 1987 just the separation when I did Johnny Winter, you know, just for one simple vinyl ran like $20,000 to do the films and then the films would be shipped to the printer and from the films, right, you would pull and do the record cover. Let’s say you’re working for an English label or a German label or whatever, you know all of a sudden it would be packaged and FedExed and I was nervous that something would get damaged.
Now, all of this process that I’ve described you could do it in a matter of minutes on your laptop literally and you don’t have to go through all of these steps. The actual imagery, layouts, and the designs are simply just sent over the internet to the printer and away they go. I mean, you actually eliminated about 10 steps and literally thousands of dollars worth of product. Of course not to point to the fact that all of these industries that existed and functioned to bring printed material to you back in those days have completely evaporated and disappeared. I mean, these were guys who worked for three or four decades doing that type of craft and overnight it all just went away. It was weird. As far as creative is concerned, you have more options, right? I prefer when I have the time, I still will do a painting or an illustration because the good thing about that is now the original, there’s validity and in the rock memorabilia market, which is where primarily I make a lot of my sales right now. I sell signed prints of my art and I sell the original paintings. And they sell in the $60-80,000 range right now, the originals because fans want to own that and they’ll pay whatever you desire, whether they want to own the original art. You could do this and then obviously I can compose digitally or photographic. Take something like a cover like Wish You Were Here or a cover like Houses of the Holy, you could do all of that on your laptop now but it used to have to be done and you would on the board, create, put up the landscape of the rocks, let’s say that particular cover, and with a scalpel and glue you would cut it and position all the kids going up the rocks and when that was done you would rephotograph that and then you would have one large black and white print of your collage, right? And then with coloured inks and you would go in and retouch and colour in the drawing which gave it a surrealistic kind of look and then that would be the album cover. That whole process with all of these steps, now you don’t need to do all of that.
Angie: You co-authored a couple books: one about album covers with Martin Popoff and another with Denny Somach about Led Zeppelin, can you tell me about those?
Ioannis: Martin had interviewed me back in 2006 for a magazine he wrote for, we became friends. We chatted about doing something together and talked about our love for vinyl hard rock album covers. To our amazement we realised that no one had bothered to do a book on it. We pitched the idea to a publisher and on approval went ahead. Martin in charge of the writing and me on the images. We settled on 250 vinyl albums from the 60s to late 90s. We based our picks on best of lists, fan sites, readers polls. Between our contacts we interviewed either the band, cover artist or both. For the images we had to find the vinyls and photograph them which involved visiting old record stores, flea markets and friends collections and looking for original copies. Then photograph and colour enhance the images if they were damaged or worn out. So they looked great in print. We then had to locate the owners of the copyrights to get permission which was hard as the labels, managers and creators had passed away in a lot of cases. The whole process took over a year before we had everything ready for the publisher. Even though I loved the final product we swore never to put us through that process again. What were we thinking? lol
Led Zeppelin, I have known Denny and worked with him on a variety of music projects since the mid 80s. He was working on the Led Zep book thinking of a paperback, I introduced him to my publisher, she recommended instead a elaborate hard cover coffee table book filled with photos and artwork. I was asked to create the cover, design the book and 13 paintings capturing each phase of Zeppelin’s career. I loved the idea, what I decided to do was to create each painting in a style reminiscent of 70s album covers using those old techniques so the art looked like Houses of the Holy, It went down well with the fans, the book sold extremely well and all the paintings and prints I produced sold out to collectors. Would love to do a follow up someday.
Angie: What advice do you have for aspiring artists?
Ioannis: The advice I would give young artists is that this is a passion a labor of love. It’s a journey, do what your heart tells you, be persistent and stay the course. Constantly draw and create, it’s what you are, look at artists you admire, and artists through the decades that you love and soak it all in. It’s okay to imitate what you love at first, but eventually your vision will come through.
As for commissions in music befriend management companies, merchandisers, show your portfolio to labels and take what you can get , stay at it, people notice talent that helps their business and in time you will succeed. Every fellow artist, designer, or band member I have ever talked to all have gone through this path. Life is interesting and moves in unusual ways but the payoff is worth the journey.
Hypergallery, based in Henley-on-Thames, are releasing a limited edition of 50 prints of the artwork for the 1998 Deep Purple album Abandon designed by Ioannis. You can follow Ioannis on Facebook, Instagram, and his website Dangerous Age.
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